“What is success? I think it is a mixture of having a flair for the thing that you are doing; knowing that it is not enough, that you have got to have hard work and a certain sense of purpose.”
Margaret Thatcher
The journey is dense, much like the ebb and flow of life. Needless to say, we have become entrapped by the lure of destiny while forgetting the purging currently occurring before our very eyes.
Instant gratification has left the mind enamored with the sweet and savory taste of constant stimulation. We mistake endorphins for enlightenment. We confuse access with knowledge. We believe that because everything is being released to us quickly, we are expanding. In reality, much of it is decreasing our mental capacity, weakening our attention, and making us more susceptible to distraction.
We are distracted by deliberate wars: cultural wars, racial wars, economic wars, ethnic wars, and gender wars. Many of these divisions are manufactured to keep us separated, agitated, and consumed by the frivolity of things that do not aim at liberation.
Time and space cannot be taken back once they are gone.
Our society speaks often of progress, but progress without consciousness is only motion. We are too consumed by click-based living while our rights are quietly being taken from us, because too many have chosen comfort over freedom.
When one begins to adjudicate the educational system, James Baldwin becomes impossible to ignore: “The paradox of education is precisely this, that as one begins to become conscious, one begins to examine the society in which one is being educated.”
That is the dangerous beauty of true education.
It awakens the mind. It sharpens perception. It exposes the lies laced with control, domination, docility, and obedience. John Taylor Gatto understood this in Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling, arguing that compulsory schooling often teaches compliance rather than true learning.
The plausible truth remains: only self-teaching has lasting value.
The pedagogy of life should never be reduced to docility, obedience, and the fear of coloring outside the lines. A mind trained only to follow rules may never learn how to ask the questions that could save it.
At what expense?
By the time we find ourselves inside the so-called data centers, prisons, and monitored systems of a new world order, we may finally think of Orwell. But by then, it may be a day late and a dollar short.
While the wealthy keep the public focused on fixed illusions, they continue to purchase the real estate, farms, land, spaces, and systems that determine who gets to live freely and who is merely allowed to exist.
Welcome to the new world.
You have been forewarned.
Understand this: no country enters another country simply to save its people. There is almost always an economic desire beneath the language of rescue. Preemptive wars do not simply happen. Always investigate the true instigator. Always ask who benefits. Always follow the resources, the money, the land, and the narrative.
The same applies to cultural wars, racial wars, economic wars, ethnic wars, and gender wars. Division rarely appears without design.
Critical thinking has fallen by the wayside because our attention spans have become shorter than a breath. We scroll. We react. We repeat. We become fluent in outrage while forgetting how to think.
James Baldwin once wrote, “It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.”
That sentence should trouble us.
It should trouble every classroom, every institution, every government, every platform, every home, and every person who believes they are free simply because they are entertained.
Hopefully, when we stop being stuck on stupid, we can truly live. We may remember that we are more alike than separate. We may begin to see that divide and conquer has always depended on our willingness to defend what we never consciously chose.
Robert Mugabe once said something that still resonates with the current state of affairs in many parts of the world: they decided your name, nationality, religion, and tribe, and you spend the rest of your life defending something you did not even choose.
Do you not see how that makes a fool of the unconscious mind?
Wake up.
This is a psychosis that rarely wants to know its root. Yet with respect and contemplation, we may ascend through the discipline of self-education. Malcolm X captured this beautifully when he said, “My alma mater was books, a good library. I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity.”
That is where the return begins.
With curiosity.
With books.
With questions.
With discernment.
With the audacity to become conscious in a world that profits from complacency.
We must refuse to be force-fed lies, propaganda, fear, and manufactured debates designed to distract us from the realities of life.
You are the asset.
Not the schools.
Not social media.
Not television.
Not the algorithms.
Not the debates created to keep you agitated while someone else profits from your distraction.
You are the asset.
Your mind. Your attention. Your curiosity. Your discernment. Your discipline. Your stamina. Your willingness to think beyond what you have been told.
Success, then, is not merely flair. It is not merely talent. It is not the applause of a distracted world.
Success is purpose with stamina.
It is the courage to study when others scroll.
It is the humility to learn when others perform certainty.
It is the discipline to question every system that benefits from your obedience.
It is the audacity to become conscious in a world that profits from your sleep.
–
© 2026 Sherley Delia. All rights reserved.
Healing Majestically 